Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Rishab Kumar, staff developer evangelist at Twilio and Microsoft MVP. Rishab creates amazing content on his YouTube channel and is an all-around serverless savant. In fact, right now he has a challenge going on to help teach serverless to as many people as possible - the cloud resume API challenge. Whether you’re AWS, Azure, or GCP, Rishab has something for you. Thank you for everything you do, Rishab!

Tutorials

I really appreciate all the work Ben Pyle has been doing in the Rust space. His article last week on building an API with Rust and Lambda is not only a foundational piece, but a great explanation of important concepts like project layout, function structure, and how to work with the Rust AWS SDK. You can use this project as a template for all your upcoming Rust experiments, it has a little bit of everything.

Matteo Depascale wrote an amazing article about how he created his own serverless newsletter using Amazon SES. He goes through every single gotcha to setting everything up and calls out the important metrics to track and how to respond to them. Having written a newsletter app myself, it’s super cool to see other approaches to reach the same end goal. Great job, Matteo!

Interesting Reads

Jimmy Dahlqvist always builds the coolest projects. Last week he shared a recent build where he created a service for static site analytics using Lambda@Edge. He goes through the full setup in detail and has included the entire project on his site, www.serverless-handbook.com. There are a lot of moving parts to this, but he explains it so well and has architected it in a way that makes it easy to follow and approachable to implement yourself.

We haven’t had a DynamoDB post in a while. I ran across a post from Tom Muc last week about the DynamoDB mistakes he made so you don’t have to. Oftentimes when I see articles like this I see the same generic three rules, but this one you can tell comes from experience. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in there, like advocating for GSI overloading to account for single table design, the majority of his lessons are fantastic and should be considered in your data models.

Did you know that many AWS services publish events to EventBridge automatically when certain interactions occur? Matt Martz gave a talk on the Believe in Serverless livestream where he talks about the many AWS service events and how to use them. He goes through what these events are, how to find the schemas, how to create rules that watch all events in your account, and much more. Very cool topic with some extremely useful applications.

Spotlight

In any production application, resilience is one of the main factors of success. How does your app respond to failures? Does it require human interaction or can it recover on its own? Pubudu Jayawardana released a blog post last week describing how PostNL approaches resiliency in mission-critical systems. Pubudu covers specifics around blast radius, the storage-first approach, retrying failures, and redriving. It’s a concise and incredibly helpful article that can help make your systems production-ready.

Tip of the Week

I’m getting more and more excited about the work Tobias and Sandro have been doing on the CloudWatch book. It looks like it’s really shaping up to be a must-have and all-encompassing book. They teased a little preview over the weekend.

Next week we're sending out the first free sample chapter for our upcoming 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱𝗪𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 via our newsletter 📕 🦉

If you haven't subscribed yet, feel free to do so to learn everything you need to know about 𝗟𝗼𝗴𝘀 & 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 🕵️https://t.co/LUtqtWmIo8 pic.twitter.com/oJBs96Jdml

— Tobias Schmidt (@tpschmidt_) March 24, 2024

New Releases

DynamoDB got support for PrivateLink, which grants you access from on-prem data centers using VPC endpoints and private IP addresses.

DynamoDB also now supports resource-based policies, allowing you to simplify access control by granting IAM principals access to a resource and what actions they can perform on it. It also makes cross-account access to tables easier, but I’m unsure if that’s a good thing.

Last Words

I’m sure many of you saw the Redis licensing change last week. This is a really big deal and is best explained by Khawaja Shams. I’m unsure what the fallout is going to be exactly, but we’re already starting to see motion in the community to keep Redis open source. Like many of you, I care deeply about open-source software and relicensing announcements like this make me disappointed. But in times like this, you see the community shine to regroup and make things better.

As a side note - this license change does not affect Momento. Your serverless caches are safe 💚

Anyway, If you’d like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send me a message on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen